There’s something truly exhilarating about reading a novel that’s so audaciously original, so inventive and let’s be honest, so sort of weird that you want to put it in the hands of just about everyone you know. And that’s a perfect description of Alexander Maksik’s stunningly unsettling third novel, “Shelter in Place.”

Maksik settles us into the life of Joe March, just graduated from a so-so college, working in a bar, and madly in love with the feisty, volatile Tess. His sister Claire has severed family ties and vanished to a shiny new married life in London, while Joe grapples with a bipolar mental illness he’s sure has flown from his mom, Anne-Marie, to him.

But Anne-Marie has problems of her own. Encountering a strange man bullying his wife in a parking lot, she kills him with a hammer and is sent to prison. To be closer to the prison, Joe, Tess and his heartbroken, devoted father set up house in Washington state, and the story begins its heady spin, whiplashing back and forth through time right up into Joe’s 40s.

But in a Maksik novel, things are never the way you expect them. Anne-Marie becomes a celebrity to battered women, who fight to free her. Tess and Joe notice a neighbor, Sam Young, a professor and father, who likes to bash his wife against walls, something that horrifies them both. But Joe is the kind of man who wants things to stay safe and in place, to mind his own business, and he’s not sure what to do about this.

But Anne-Marie is. Carefully, slowly, she builds a rapport with Tess, until Tess is prepared to incite an act that is both heroic and deadly, one that will have terrible consequences for everyone, including a prison guard they befriend.

Maksik’s writing has the strange, dangerous gleam of madness, as Joe pivots from normality to mental illness, a state of “thick tar inching through my body” along with “a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lungs.” There’s a rapid-fire intimacy to the novel because Joe talks to us as if he were hunched on a bar stool, grabbing our hands and insisting we listen because he’s barely hanging on and he’s trying to put a narrative to his life.

But he’s not just talking to us, he’s talking to Tess, and Claire and his parents, and he admits that his memory is “warped and muted and remade.” Joe pleads with and even taunts the reader. “What do you know so far?” he asks, as if he himself isn’t quite certain of the narrative. In doing so, he forces us all to be part of his narrative, even complicit in some way.

Along the journey, homes fracture. People Joe loves leave or die or sometimes return. Youth fades into age. How we shelter — from beatings, from mental illness, from family, love and even from our own selves — underscores everything.

If there is one flaw, it’s Tess, whose actions don’t seem completely earned or believable — but maybe that’s part of Joe’s madness, not to understand them or see them for what they really are. There is no typical resolution, where the hero learns something or changes, but that’s actually part of the novel’s genius.

“Everything that lasts is invention, followed by tenacious faith,” says Joe. Like Joe, perhaps the best we can hope for is a snap of connection, a calm salve for the loneliness of living, and a forgiveness for the way things really are.